


Calm

by goldenhart



Category: Hornblower - C. S. Forester
Genre: Canonical Character Death, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-26
Updated: 2020-08-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26127001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenhart/pseuds/goldenhart
Summary: You never learned to sit still.
Relationships: William Bush/Horatio Hornblower
Comments: 8
Kudos: 11





	Calm

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as always to sanguinity for advice and encouragement.

You never learned to sit still.

Oh, attempts have been made. At school, in the finger-numbing hours of the morning before the sun rose, you’d fidget and fiddle with your quill instead of doing your Latin or Greek, and more than once your teacher birched you. He meant to beat you into submission. It only made you more defiant.

Your father took you out of that school after a while. Your new tutor didn’t even try to make you sit still. He knew defeat when he saw it.

When you were older, at the age you believed you were a man and yet were in truth no more than a boy, your superior officers tried to make you sit still. They tried, tried, and failed. When they could try no more they made you kiss the gunner’s daughter and hoped that would be the end of your rash and impulsive ways. They were wrong.

Prison was the closest thing you came to sitting still. It still gnaws at you when you cannot keep the memories at bay.

It is easy to confuse bravery with impulsivity. You were brave, certainly, but not as brave as some might say. You were impulsive, quick to gamble with fate, and fortunately for you you won more than you lost. But oh, what you lost.

Marriage could not settle you, nor children. Not even the temptation of bright, beautiful women was enough to get you to sit still for long.

The only time you were still was when he touched you. Only then were you calm.

You touched him the first time in France. You were half-mad with fear and frustration, and he was there, as constant and reliable as the North Star. You still cannot remember how you came to his door late at night. He was awake, reading, and you stumbled to him like a child, desperate for the fellow feeling you craved. You kissed him then, kissed him like you’d kissed few before, and then when he allowed that you touched him too. And then, and then, and then…

And then you were still.

Oh, but then the shame came over you, and you hid your face from him and left. You could not bear to see him watch you now, now that he knew you as he did. He had seen you laid bare, had touched you, lain with you. You hid from him again until the restlessness grew too great, and then you sought him out. He kissed you gently, like one committing sacrilege. Your wife may have worshipped you, but to him you were holy, and you allowed it; better the heretic’s touch than the votary’s prayer.

It would be pleasant to say that you spent your time wisely with him, but you did not. Your wife had died when you were in France — you wed again, and were happy for a time, playing the country squire with your beautiful wife and handsome child. You did not see your friend again until you secured for him a commission as captain of your flagship. Perhaps you had been afraid to see him — afraid of seeing a man so active confined to a desk, afraid of finding yourself confined too. But here, with the horizon stretching before you, you could breathe. When he drew his chair beside yours after dinner, when the rest of the officers had returned to their duties or their beds, you knew what would come next and you welcomed it.

After, you were both content to be still, lying there on the deck, listening to the wind harping in the rigging and the creaking of the ship as she laboured through the night. You allowed him to hold you even as you told yourself this was not to become a regular sort of thing. You had a wife, after all, and for all your captain’s good qualities you were bound to each other by something far more fragile than the bond of marriage. You would not give it a name, not even when you saw the way his face brightened at your appearance in his cabin some days later, not even when you noticed the way he held you close in the aftermath.

One day, he was gone, along with a barge of gunpowder and half a town. There was no one to keep you from your restlessness now, not even your beautiful wife could keep you still. It should be no surprise then that you returned to France, to seek out the place you had discovered what peace felt like. You never learned to sit still, but you had known what it was to be calm, if only for a minute.

You will never know it again, for the rest of your days.


End file.
